In conventional manufacturing equipment for producing products from sheets of paper, fiber, fabric, and the like, it is highly advantageous to have a manufacturing process that is substantially continuous and automated in order to produce a high output of products at efficient speeds. A particular example is the manufacturing of liners for floppy magnetic disks. Heretofore, such liners have been produced by cutting out individual liner units from a continuous sheet of nonwoven fibrous material, as shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,681,004 issued to Waldner on July 21, 1987. The volume of output can be improved, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,773,293 issued to Mizuta et al. on Sept. 27, 1988, by cutting the liner units through two sheets stacked on top of each other. The separated liner units are then assembled with other required components into diskette units.
However, it is found that the above-described conventional production of liners and assembly of diskette units has the disadvantage that the separated liner units require complex piece-wise handling once they are cut from the sheet so that the speed and efficiency of production of the liners is limited by the requirements of the downstream assembly of diskettes. In addition, the difficulty in cutting the liners cleanly poses a reliability problem that could interrupt the entire production line.
It has therefore been desired to have the liners produced in continuous roll form, so that they can be supplied as inputs to separate assembly lines for the diskettes. The production of partially cut products in continuous roll form entails the technical problems of obtaining clean incremental cuts of the products in a strip, supporting the strip of cut products so that it does not tear during processing, ensuring that the product units can be separated accurately later despite errors in cutting or processing, and winding up the strip of cut products in a continuous roll without distortion, creasing or tearing.